Sausage Stuffers

Pembroke Pines

Shop Owners Make

Hot-selling Dogs The

Old-fashioned Way.

PEMBROKE PINES — Remember the days when hot dogs would snap when you bit into them?

International Homemade Sausages still makes them that way.

The small store makes its most popular-selling item, hot dogs, the old-fashioned way with natural lamb intestine casings.

Store owners Panta and Francine Carac have been stuffing and selling sausages since they bought the store in 1989. Before that, Panta worked for the original owner and for meat-packing firms in Ohio. He gained his real sausage-making experience, however, while growing up in his native Yugoslavia.

As a child, Panta recalls making sausages in preparation for the cold Yugoslavian winter. He would have to slaughter the pig himself, as well as smoke and dry the meat.

He extended that down-home approach to his business. Carac uses absolutely no preservatives, fillers, or injected water in his products. It's all meat.

There's no soy protein or fillers in his sausages, says Panta Carac, "I got all my recipes from Europe."

Carac has entrusted these old recipes to a small, black three-ring binder. Its grimy, torn pages reflect the years Carac has spent making sausages.

The book, which Carac calls "my bible," contains the formula for the secret mixture of spices he uses in his meaty links. It also contains the formulas for the over 50 types of sausages Carac regularly produces.

Fresh kielbasa, spicy beer sausage, salami, liverwurst, hurka, and Italian sausage lie coiled like snakes inside the store's refrigerated display case. Customers can pick from three varieties of head cheese, a concoction of meat from a pig's head. Blood sausage, a dark-looking mix that includes barley and pig's blood, is also available for those with bolder tastes. More traditional favorites like bratwurst and Polish sausage cater to the Octoberfest and holiday crowds.

Carac also prepares other delights for carnivores. Ribs and bacon, the fresh-cut and unsliced kind, occupy space next to the pungent sausages.

Smell, in fact, is what many customers first notice when they walk into the Carac's store.

"Some people come in here and just smell the place. It brings back memories from their childhood," says Francine Carac, who handles customers when her husband is busy. "They remember back when they'd go to the local butcher and get an order for their mothers. Some come here just to relive memories. It's the smell of the meat and the smokehouse."

The small, 2,500-square-foot store contains everything needed to produce the sausage. A hickory wood-powered smokehouse shares space with the drying room and the packing room.

Panta begins the process by mixing the ingredients and feeding them into the packing machine. This machine, which pumps the meat into the casing, is the only mechanical part of the process. Carac feeds the hog or sheep intestines into the packing machine, then ties and twirls the newly made lengths of sausage. He deftly arranges the sausage onto large racks and rolls the heavy cart into the smokehouse. The amount of sausage loaded on one set of racks can weigh more than 300 pounds.

From the smokehouse, the sausage travels to the drying room, and then to the display case. Some products, like salami, take up to a month and a half to make, due to the time required for proper drying.

The painstaking work is made only more laborious by the steps Carac takes to insure quality. He could, for instance, have the hams he orders arrive already processed and de-boned. Carac, however, prefers to remove the bone and fat himself, and to do any curing or preparation required.

"All my work is based on quality," says Carac. "This has been my goal in life, to run my own business."

International Homemade Sausages is at 1000 N. University Drive. The store is open Tuesday through Saturday, 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Call 1-305-432-7231.